Pictures at an Exhibition is a piano suite in ten movements, plus a recurring and varied Promenade theme, written in 1874, by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. It is a musical depiction of a tour of an exhibition of works by architect and painter Viktor Hartmann put on at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, following his sudden death in the previous year. Each movement of the suite is based on an individual work, some of which are lost.
The composition has become a showpiece for virtuoso pianists, and became widely known from orchestrations and arrangements produced by other composers and contemporary musicians, with Maurice Ravel's 1922 adaptation for orchestra being the most recorded and performed. The suite, particularly the final movement, "The Bogatyr Gates", is widely considered one of Mussorgsky's greatest works.
Composition history
The composition is based on pictures by the artist, architect, and designer Viktor Hartmann. It was probably in 1868 that Mussorgsky first met Hartmann, not long after the latter's return to Russia from abroad. Both men were devoted to the cause of an intrinsically Russian art and quickly became friends. They likely met in the home of the influential critic Vladimir Stasov, who followed both of their careers with interest. According to Stasov's testimony, in 1868, Hartmann gave Mussorgsky two of the pictures that later formed the basis of Pictures at an Exhibition. In 1870, Mussorgsky dedicated the second song ("In the Corner") of the cycle The Nursery to Hartmann. Stasov remarked that Hartmann loved Mussorgsky's compositions, and particularly liked the "Scene by the Fountain" in his opera Boris Godunov. Mussorgsky had abandoned the scene in his original 1869 version, but at the requests of Stasov and Hartmann, he reworked it for Act 3 in his revision of 1872.
The years 1873–74 are associated with the staging of Boris Godunov, the zenith of Mussorgsky's career as a composer—at least from the standpoint of public acclaim. Mussorgsky's distant relative, friend, and roommate during this period, Arseniy Golenishchev-Kutuzov, describing the January 1874 premiere of the opera, remarked: "During the winter, there were, I think, nine performances, and each time the theatre was sold out, each time the public tumultuously called for Mussorgsky." The composer's victory, however, was overshadowed by the hostile press he received from critics. Other circumstances conspired to dampen Mussorgsky's spirits. The disintegration of The Mighty Handful and their failure to understand his artistic goals contributed to the isolation he experienced as an outsider in Saint Petersburg's musical establishment. Golenishchev-Kutuzov wrote: "[The Mighty Handful's] banner was held by Mussorgsky alone; all the other members had left it and pursued his own path ..."
Hartmann's sudden death on 4 August 1873 from an aneurysm shook Mussorgsky along with others in Russia's art world. The loss of the artist, aged only 39, plunged the composer into deep despair. Stasov helped to organize a memorial exhibition of over 400 Hartmann works in the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg in February and March 1874. Mussorgsky lent to the exhibition the two pictures Hartmann had given him, and viewed the show in person. Later in June, two-thirds of the way through composing his song cycle Sunless, Mussorgsky was inspired to compose Pictures at an Exhibition, quickly completing the score in three weeks (2–22 June 1874). In a letter to Stasov (see photo), probably written on 12 June 1874, he describes his progress:
The music depicts his tour of the exhibition, with each of the ten numbers of the suite serving as a musical illustration of an individual work by Hartmann.
Five days after finishing the composition, he wrote on the title page of the manuscript a tribute to Vladimir Stasov, to whom the work is dedicated. One month later, he added an indication that he intended to have it published.
Golenishchev-Kutuzov gives the following (perhaps biased) account of the work's reception among Mussorgsky's friends and colleagues and an explanation for his failure to follow through on his plans to publish it:
In August, Mussorgsky completed the last two songs of Sunless and then resumed work on Khovanshchina, composing the prelude to Act 1 ("Dawn on the Moscow River") in September.
Publication history
As with most of Mussorgsky's works, Pictures at an Exhibition has a complicated publication history. Although composed very rapidly, during June 1874, the work did not appear in print until 1886, five years after the composer's death, when an edition by the composer's friend and colleague Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov was published. This edition, however, was not a completely accurate representation of Mussorgsky's score but presented a revised text that contained a number of errors and misreadings.
Only in 1931, marking the 50th anniversary of the composer's death, was Pictures at an Exhibition published in a scholarly edition in agreement with his manuscript, to be included in Volume 8 of Pavel Lamm's M. P. Mussorgsky: Complete Collected Works (1939).
In 1940, the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola published an important critical edition of Mussorgsky's work with extensive commentary.
Mussorgsky's hand-written manuscript was published in facsimile in 1975.
{| class="wikitable" !Year !Editor !Publisher !Notes |- |1886 |Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov |V. Bessel and Co., Saint Petersburg |Revised edition |- |1931 |Pavel Lamm |Muzgiz, Moscow |Restoration of the composer's score |- |1975 | |Muzïka, Moscow |Facsimile of the composer's manuscript
Hartmann's pictures
Mussorgsky based his musical material on drawings and watercolours by Hartmann produced mostly during the artist's travels abroad. Locales include Italy, France, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Today most of the pictures from the Hartmann exhibition are lost, making it impossible to be sure in many cases which Hartmann works Mussorgsky had in mind.
Arts critic Alfred Frankenstein gave an account of Hartmann, with reproductions of his pictures, in the article "Victor Hartmann and Modeste Mussorgsky" in The Musical Quarterly (July 1939). Frankenstein wrote that he had identified seven pictures by catalogue number, corresponding to: "Tuileries" [Movement 3] (now lost) "Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks" [Movement 5] "Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle" [Movement 6] (Frankenstein suggested two separate portraits, still extant, as the basis for "Two Jews: Rich and Poor") "Catacombs" [Movement 8] "The Hut on Hen's Legs" [Movement 9] "The Bogatyr Gates" [Movement 10] The surviving works that can be shown with certainty to have been used by Mussorgsky in assembling his suite, along with their titles, are as follows:
MovementTitleTitle (English)Picture5. Ballet of the Unhatched ChicksЭскизы театральных костюмов к балету "Трильби"Sketches of theatre costumes for the ballet Trilby6. "Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle"Еврей в меховой шапке. СандомирJew in a fur cap. SandomierzСандомирский [еврей]Sandomierz [Jew]8. Catacombs (Roman Tomb)Парижские катакомбы (с фигурами В. А. Гартмана, В. А. Кенеля и проводника, держащего фонарь)Paris Catacombs (with the figures of V. A. Hartmann, V. A. Kenel, and a guide holding a lantern)9. The Hut on Hen's Legs ([The Hut] of Baba Yaga)Избушка Бабы-Яги на курьих ножках. Часы в русском стилеThe hut of Baba-Yaga on hen's legs. Clock in the Russian style10. The Bogatyr Gates (In the Capital in Kiev)Проект городских ворот в Киеве. Главный фасадProject for city gates in Kiev. Main façade Note: Mussorgsky owned the two pictures that together inspired No. 6, the so-called "Two Jews". The title of No. 6b, as provided by the Soviet editors of his letters, is Сандомирский [еврей] (Sandomirskiy [yevrey] or Sandomierz [Jew]). The bracketed word yevrey ( "Hebrew") is the sanitized form of the actual word in the title, very likely the derogatory epithet жид (zhid or yid).
Movements Vladimir Stasov's program, identified below, and the six known extant pictures suggest the ten pieces that make up the suite correspond to eleven pictures by Hartmann, with "Samuel Goldenberg und Schmuÿle" accounting for two. The five Promenades are not numbered with the ten pictures and consist in the composer's manuscript of two titled movements and three untitled interludes appended to the first, second, and fourth pictures.See Pavel Lamm's 1931 edition.
Mussorgsky links the suite's movements in a way that depicts the viewer's own progress through the exhibition. Two Promenade movements stand as portals to the suite's main sections. Their regular pace and irregular meter depict the act of walking. Three untitled interludes present shorter statements of this theme, varying the mood, colour, and key in each to suggest reflection on a work just seen or anticipation of a new work glimpsed. A turn is taken in the work at the "Catacombae" when the Promenade theme stops functioning as merely a linking device and becomes, in "Cum mortuis", an integral element of the movement itself. The theme reaches its climax in the suite's finale, "The Bogatyr Gates".
The first two movements of the suite—one grand, one grotesque—find mirrored counterparts, and climaxes, at the end. The suite traces a journey that begins at an art exhibition, but the line between observer and observed vanishes at the Catacombs when the journey takes on a different character.
The table below shows the order of movements.
Title in scoreEnglish translationKeyMeterTempoPromenadeB major , Allegro giusto, nel modo russico; senza allegrezza, ma poco sostenuto 1Gnomus (Latin)The GnomeE minor Vivo and Meno mosso, pesantePromenadeA major , Moderato commodo assai e con delicatezza 2Il vecchio castello (Italian)The Old CastleG minor Andante molto cantabile e con dolorePromenadeB major , Moderato non tanto, pesamente 3Tuileries (Dispute d'enfants après jeux) (French)Tuileries (Children's Quarrel after Games)B major Allegretto non troppo, capriccioso 4Bydło (Polish)CattleG minor Sempre moderato, pesantePromenadeD minor , , Tranquillo 5Балет невылупившихся птенцов (Russian)Balet nevylupivshikhsya ptentsov ()Ballet of Unhatched ChicksF major Scherzino 6"Samuel" Goldenberg und "Schmuÿle" (Yiddish)"Samuel" Goldenberg and "Schmuÿle"B minor Andante. Grave energico and AndantinoPromenade (omitted in Ravel Orchestration)B major , , Allegro giusto, nel modo russico, poco sostenuto 7Limoges. Le marché (La grande nouvelle) (French)Limoges. The Market (The Great News)E major Allegretto vivo, sempre scherzando 8Catacombae (Sepulcrum romanum) (Latin)Catacombs (Roman Tomb)B minor LargoCum mortuis in lingua mortua (Latin)With the Dead in a Dead LanguageB minor Andante non troppo con lamento 9Избушка на курьих ножках (Баба-Яга) (Russian)Izbushka na kuryikh nozhkakh (Baba-Yaga) ()The Hut on Hen's Legs (Baba Yaga)C minor Allegro con brio, feroce and Andante mosso 10Богатырские ворота (В стольном городе во Киеве) (Russian)Bogatyrskiye vorota (V stolnom gorode vo Kiyeve) ()The Bogatyr Gates (In the Capital in Kiev)(Often translated as "The Great Gate of Kiev" or "The Heroes' Gate at Kiev")E major Allegro alla breve. Maestoso, con grandezza
Promenade
Vladimir Stasov's comment: In this piece Mussorgsky depicts himself "roving through the exhibition, now leisurely, now briskly in order to come close to a picture that had attracted his attention, and at times sadly, thinking of his departed friend."
The piece has simple, strong rhythms in asymmetrical meter. The promenade theme is shown below:
1. The Gnome Stasov's comment: "A sketch depicting a little gnome, clumsily running with crooked legs."
Hartmann's sketch, now lost, is thought to represent a design for a nutcracker displaying large teeth. The lurching music, in contrasting tempos with frequent stops and starts, suggests the movements of the gnome.
Promenade (2nd)